As you may have noticed, the game materials released so far are all in HTML5 (hence the Chrome forward design process). This gives us a lot of potential advantages, such as true portability and not needing a download in the browser version. However, we are still optimizing for speed. Most of the speed issues are from us using off the shelf communication between your browser and our servers (like 90% of the data it's moving is irrelevant) so once we have that customized we'll be in good shape. BUT we all also love smooth framerates from our animations, and that's in the browser. Well, the new Chrome Canary version apparently has updated its animation processing and has doubled our FPS, which is awesome news (Canary is like a testing ground, and it's features usually show up in standard Chrome after a few months).

Also, remember when the second Kickstarter began, and I explained that our goal was lower because of another company that would be picking up part of the tab in exchange for us making a modified version of Horzons for their market. Well, I'm sure it's no surprise to you all that this market is Japan, and we've finally got all the paper work done for that deal (when did I last talk about that? November? That's moving at the speed of business...) As part of the deal, we'll be creating some game features just for the Japanese market. Whether or not we use them for the English version is up to us -- and YOU (so tell us your thoughts in the comments). Some of their ideas I'm personally not crazy about, modern Japanese digital TCG's have some iffy mechanics (matter of taste, of course).

One system they want is crafting, and I personally don't see any reason NOT to include it in the US version, since it's basically just another way to get free cards. For those players who used Alteil 1's Recycler, I guess it serves a similar purpose, but since you can influence the rates of cards generated by what recipe you use, there's a bit more control. For example, maybe a certain recipe will have double the chance of Gowen cards, or something.

GGG has got a UI put together for it, with a Cauldron as the crafting mechanism: